Michael Vernick, government contracts partner with Akin Gump, discusses various aspects of the False Claims Act, including the potential for increased enforcement activity under the Biden administration, especially actions related to the CARES Act, and how companies and institutions can mitigate whistleblower and compliance related risks.
Continue Reading The Expanding Scope of False Claims Enforcement Activity
According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Legal and Compliance, the level of digital maturity for most law departments is shockingly low. Gartner, a leading IT research and advisory company however, goes further and drills down to identify three critical opportunities for senior in-house leaders eager to rectify the situation: establishing (or strengthening) foundational systems of record; enabling core workflows with digital investments (beyond sending emails or excel spreadsheets); and transitioning largely analog risk management methodologies to digital.
Continue Reading Gartner to Law Departments: Begin with Digital Basics
Brad Blickstein, founder of Blickstein Group reflects on ILTACON 2021, and its gradual shift of focus over the past few years.
Continue Reading ILTACON Tackles Changing Legal Service Delivery Models
In a piece from Joe Patrice, senior editor with Above the Law, outside counsel guidelines are forcing law firms to waste oodles of time on “meaningless make work.” Citing Aderant’s recently released “Law Firm Leader Survey on Outside Counsel Guidelines,” Patrice says that while the whole report is worth checking out, the outside counsel guideline issue can be summed in a short list of challenges respondents said they face in managing OCGs:
Continue Reading Outside Counsel Guidelines’ TLDR Challenge
Jonathan Solomon, principal with Fish & Richardson, discusses the state of the cryptocurrency industry – what kinds of technologies his clients are looking to patent, the challenges of obtaining patent protection in this area, and where he sees the industry heading in the future.
Continue Reading Patent Protection for Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology
You’ve heard of the Summer of Love. Well, this year it’s the Summer of Lucre. Law firms, awash in deal work, are showering cash and benefits on associates, who suddenly can write their own tickets. This recently prompted a recruiter, Princeton Legal Search Group, to ask an obvious question: What impact is the war for talent having on in-house recruiting?
Continue Reading The Summer of Lucre
Brendan Miller, legal operations advisor for practice innovation, and Troy Zander and Jordan Carr, partners with Barnes & Thornburg, discuss the typical process of drafting transactional documents and how new software tools can provide more predictability, greater efficiency, and other benefits – for clients and lawyers alike.
Continue Reading Transactional Document Drafting Receives a Tech Upgrade
In a piece from The Lawyer, Katy Dowell pulled together an interesting analysis of the Big Four’s focus on law. While we have not seen seismic shifts arising from the granting of ABS licenses to three of the Big Four in 2014 (Deloitte came later in 2018), we are seeing a steady and burgeoning growth in market share. And this land grab seems to be far enough below the radar that its victims, big law firms, have not recognized or reacted to the threat.
Continue Reading The Big 4 (Quietly) Grabs Market Share
In this piece from Princeton Legal Search Group, the focus shifts from the eye-popping salaries we read about every day – Milbank raises first-year associates to $200K and eighth-year associates to $355K and Davis Polk ups the ante to $205K/$365K – to why. According to the folks at Princeton, the question is whether top compensation is enough. Is money enough to buy associate happiness and loyalty? Not necessarily, they conclude.
Continue Reading Is BIG Money BIG Enough?
Cryptocurrency assets now top $1.5 trillion globally, attracting a wave of cyber crime.
Continue Reading Cyberattacks on Cryptocurrency Assets: Risk Mitigation and Insurance Coverage